Do you know, I'm not even sure I believe in ghosts, which is strange, I guess, because, you know, I talk to the dead every day.

I've been teaching people how to talk to spirits for years.

Spirits, yes, but ghosts.

Well, they come with a lot of baggage, don't they?

Rattling chains and jilted lovers, throwing themselves off windswept cliffs,

or poisoned husbands coming back from the dead for the will reading to point ominously at

their murderous widows. Goes to somehow a different thing. So, for instance, I could hold up

pictures of different locations.

And literally everyone could pick the ones that are probably haunted versus probably not haunted.

If you had to pick between an abandoned amusement park and a newly built commercial greenhouse,

you would say that the amusement park was haunted

and the greenhouse wasn't.

But if ghosts are nothing more than the wandering spirits of the dead,

that shouldn't be the case.

A ghost is somehow more than that.

A ghost is a memory of a tragedy.

And if it has a purpose, it is some kind of reminding.

Is it also the spirit of a dead human?

Sometimes, maybe.

And so appropriately for the Christmas episode, let me elaborate on the purpose

of ghosts. It is, of course, a subtle Dickens reference, maybe not even that subtle. It is an

obvious Dickens reference. Let me elaborate with some stories from the most haunted place

...